Communication networks are important for providing data and voice communication. Communication networks allow many different computing devices, for example, personal computers, IP telephony devices or servers to communicate with each other and/or with various other network elements or remote servers attached to the network. Such networks regularly include many interconnected nodes, commonly known as switches or routers, for routing traffic through the network. Monitoring networks is important to ensure reliable operation, fault detection, timely mitigation of potentially malicious activities, and more. Network taps are generally known in the art for connecting to networks and providing a port to monitor the communication traffic on the network. Such networks regularly include many interconnected nodes, commonly known as switches or routers, for routing traffic through the network.
In packet switched communication systems, a router is a switching device that receives packets containing data or control information on one port, and based on destination information contained within the packet, routes the packet out another port to a destination (or an intermediary destination). Conventional routers perform this switching function by evaluating header information contained within a first data block in the packet. Efficient switching of packets through the router is of paramount concern.
To help alleviate the problem of limited access to networks for monitoring, inline packet aggregation devices have been developed that allow sharing access to the monitored network data. These packet aggregation devices allow users to take data from one or more network monitoring points and forward it to multiple different monitoring tools according to user specified forwarding rules. The packet aggregation devices typically provide some filtering capabilities beyond traditional packet switches/routers including the ability to aggregate and filter traffic from multiple network sources and the ability to multicast traffic to multiple ports. It is desirable for such packet aggregation devices to have an ability to identify network sources for each packet especially if multiple network links are aggregated into one or more LAGs.